This invention relates to the removal of meat from Crustacean members having tubular shells, and particularly crab legs.
The present common method of removing meat from crab legs is to manually shake them out. The crab is slaughtered on a knife edge into two sections, cleaned, washed, cooked, and cooled rapidly in cold water. Each of the two sections comprises a half body shoulder and five legs including the claw. After shaking the meat out of the body shoulder, the legs are separated from the body and prepared for shaking.
The meat from the crab leg is a slender piece of meat which is about 4 to 5 times more valuable if unbroken. With manual shaking, the breakage can be due to several reasons. Overcooking makes the meat fibers tender and easily broken. Undercooking results in the meat sticking to the shell. In large scale continuous production, it is difficult to cook each leg to the optimum temperature and for the right amount of time, particularly because of variations in hardness of the shells. It is normally difficult to extract meat from the shell by shaking. To facilitate removal, it is common practice to enlarge the opening of the shell by blows with a tool which further contributes to damaging of the meat.
Methods other than manual shaking have been proposed and tried, including blowing out the meat with water, drawing out with vacuum, squeezing out with rollers, and the use of centrifugal force. However, these methods have not significantly reduced meat breakage. The use of rollers also results in discoloration of the meat due to removal of some of the pigment from the surface of the meat. Apparatus using serrated cutters for cutting the shells of Crustaceans have been proposed. However, these are not entirely satisfactory either, as serrated cutters leave bits of shell embedded in the meat.